On "Forbes Newsroom," Ilya Somin, a legal scholar and attorney, discussed his and the Liberty Justice Center's lawsuit against the Trump Administration which aims to end the President's tariffs.
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00:00President Trump has been publicly pro-tariff since before he was president, all the way back to at least the 1980s.
00:08He's been saying the United States has been getting ripped off by other countries for years now,
00:12and even on the campaign trail leading up to his second term, he promised tariffs.
00:16So it should really come as no surprise that on April 2nd, he unveiled what he called Liberation Day, his sweeping tariff policy.
00:24Even the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against these tariffs.
00:28So to start off the conversation, can you lay out your case?
00:31Yeah, our case is very simple.
00:33The president has usurped the powers of Congress on a massive, gargantuan scale.
00:39What he's doing is illegal and unconstitutional and also hugely damaging to the United States and world economies.
00:47So we intend to ask the courts to stop it, as we have done in the lawsuit that we filed on Monday.
00:53So you're really not mincing words here.
00:55You're saying what he's done with these tariffs is unconstitutional.
00:58He invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 as a reason to impose these tariffs.
01:05And you're saying that's not right.
01:08Can you explain that case a little bit?
01:09Yeah, our case is very simple.
01:13This law, known as IEPA for short, doesn't even mention tariffs.
01:17Therefore, the power to impose tariffs simply is not one of the powers that is granted by that law.
01:23Even if hypothetically it was granted, there are still multiple other problems with the president's position.
01:28One is that that law can only be invoked when there is a national emergency.
01:33There is no emergency over bilateral trade deficits because an emergency by its nature is a sudden unexpected crisis.
01:41These kinds of bilateral trade deficits with various countries by the administration's own admission have existed for decades.
01:47They're not an emergency.
01:49They're not even a crisis at all or a problem at all because there's nothing wrong with having a situation where we buy more goods from another country than they buy from us.
01:58Any more than there's some kind of problem in my life if I have a trade deficit with my local supermarket because they virtually never buy anything that I produce, whereas I buy a lot of things from them.
02:08But it's not a problem.
02:10In addition, even if hypothetically we agree that there is an emergency still, according to the law, that emergency has to involve an extraordinary and unusual threat from abroad to U.S. economy or security.
02:23There's nothing extraordinary or unusual about bilateral trade deficits.
02:27They happen all the time and they're not a threat at all because they're not actually harmful to the economy.
02:33There's nothing actually wrong with them.
02:35There's economists across the political spectrum who will say that, some of whom are likely to file a brief supporting our case.
02:42So that's another level on which there's no authorization for this.
02:46And in addition, the Supreme Court has said in several decisions in recent years that when the executive claims the power to decide a major question that is a major economic or political or social issue,
03:00they can only do that if Congress has clearly delegated the power to them.
03:05And here, there's just no such clear delegation whatsoever.
03:08It's not clear if there's even ambiguous delegation here.
03:11And obviously, there's also no question that what's going on here is a major question.
03:16We're talking about the biggest tax increase in Americans in several decades, the biggest trade war since the Great Depression, imposing tariffs massively on almost every country in the world.
03:28So if this is not a major question, I do not know what is.
03:32And then finally, assume somehow the statute does authorize what the president is doing.
03:38In that event, it would be unconstitutional because there's limits to how much legislative power Congress can delegate to the president.
03:48And the power to set tariffs and trade policy is specifically enumerated as a congressional power in Article 1 of the Constitution.
03:57Admittedly, the Supreme Court's precedent on exactly what are the limits of delegation are somewhat fuzzy.
04:03But if this is not an excessive delegation, I do not know what is, because essentially, if the president's position is correct,
04:11then what he's claiming is that he can use IEPA to impose tariffs on any country in any amount at any time for almost any reason he wants.
04:19If that is not an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power, then nothing is.
04:24And if that is, I do not know what is.